Degenerate Art Ensemble

Degenerate Art Ensemble:Cuckoo Crow

"Degenerate Art Ensemble have stampeded over every artistic boundary they have found before them... The music is so rampant with ideas that it peoples the theatre of the imagination with its own compelling actors." The Wire

Los Angeles premiere

Barrages of frantic avant-garde music blend seamlessly with inventive Butoh-inspired movement and intense physical theater in this rich, multilayered production from Seattle’s high-octane experimental group. Led by Haruko Nishimura and Joshua Kohl, the six-member ensemble invokes a fantastical landscape of dark poetry and offbeat humor as it stages the mythical resurrection of a fallen baby crow—whose egg had been pushed out of its nest by a pair of cuckoo hatchlings. This unusually visceral performance features a whole battery of specially designed musical instruments and layers of visual stimulation--from elaborate costumes, projected animation by Stefan Gruber and the combination of both.

This project is made possible in part by a grant from the National Performance Network’s Performance Residency Program. Major contributors of the National Performance Network include the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency), Altria and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. For more information, see npnweb.org.

REDCAT NEWS

The New Original Works Festival (NOW) is a three-week interdisciplinary program offering a variety of short works and some longer projects in their Los Angeles premieres. The Festival takes place in July and August and artists are given development support through rehearsal space, technical assistance, access to equipment and an honorarium. Projects are selected through a proposal process, with an emphasis on new projects in development and/or early career artists.